GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 592605
[enh] show fewer notification bubbles (or none at all)
Last modified: 2012-03-30 11:43:05 UTC
Network Manager applet is currently showing a lot of notification bubbles. We should try to reduce the number of them. One that certainly doesn't need to be there it the "You've connected to network" one. This is especially bad when the user is actually interacting with the applet. Changing the icon should be enough. An additional indicator would be apps should reload their content. That is the way I really know I'm online anyway. The you have networks available bubble should probably go too. We should use a more obvious icon to indicate this state. I think we also show a disconnected from network bubble. In the case where I manually disconnect we definitely shouldn't show it. In the cases where it is disconnected on its own we should show an icon that makes it obvious that either: * we're trying to connect to another one * we have new networks available * no signal I suppose the VPN one is necessary for compliance and whatnot... so I guess it is ok. What other bubbles do we have?
So we added one of these in bug #534427. I don't think I agree with that. We should do two things instead: * Use an icon that tells the user there are available networks * Patch applications that try to connect to the network to run a to-be-written network diagnostic/connection tool to connect when needed
Created attachment 141379 [details] [review] schemas patch So there are a few gconf keys to control these bubbles. However, there is no schemas file for the applet. This adds one. I haven't been able to test this yet.
Oops. I forgot the close tags in the schemas file in that patch.
(In reply to comment #0) > Network Manager applet is currently showing a lot of notification bubbles. We > should try to reduce the number of them. > > One that certainly doesn't need to be there it the "You've connected to > network" one. This is especially bad when the user is actually interacting > with the applet. Changing the icon should be enough. An additional indicator > would be apps should reload their content. That is the way I really know I'm > online anyway. > > The you have networks available bubble should probably go too. We should use a > more obvious icon to indicate this state. Just need some candidates we can throw around. I really have no idea what we should do here for an icon. We don't have a lot of space in the default case (22x22) so we'll need some pretty discoverable thing to say "you've got some networks you can connect to" in a picture. > I think we also show a disconnected from network bubble. In the case where I > manually disconnect we definitely shouldn't show it. In the cases where it is This is an artifact of how the applet used to monitor for disconnects. That's pretty easy to fix up actually (listen for device state and then act on the reason code for the state change instead of just looking for the global disconnected signal) and Ubuntu had a hack-job patch for this that I wanted to them to rework but I haven't seen any rework of that yet. > disconnected on its own we should show an icon that makes it obvious that > either: > * we're trying to connect to another one The spinner/progress thing already means "trying to connect to something else". > * we have new networks available Yeah, if we can figure out something meaningful here. Not sure what to use; maybe mizmo has an idea? > * no signal no signal == not doing anything and thus the disconnected icon currently > I suppose the VPN one is necessary for compliance and whatnot... so I guess it > is ok. > > What other bubbles do we have? That should be it. connected, disconnected, vpn bubble, and wireless-networks-found are all that we do. You'll also make some Ubuntu people happy, since when Ubuntu disabled buttons in bubbles, people no longer can turn the bubbles off by clicking and then wanted a checkbox in the applet right-click menu. Thanks, guys...
*** Bug 581972 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Schemas patch fixed and pushed: 5c98dafd0c2b19d7884a35efcc37714c97a7fb3a (master) 64f8eefe2fbf0a8c47150e9b65aa1cc810ac3cb7 (0.7.x)
Turns out people do want the bubbles in many cases when for example they have the panel auto-hide, so that they know they are connected to a network when they resume. I believe that we should just turn it off this on a per-distro basis until we get the right bits in the various applications. Until then, it's still useful to have *some* indication of when you may have connected in those cases where the panel is hidden or whatnot.
FWIW, I don't agree. If you are referring to resume from suspend then the panel should show itself. Perhaps the panel should show itself briefly when a tray icon changes, or appears. This sounds like a gnome-panel bug to me. Adding back bubbles is not the answer IMO.
*** Bug 599203 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Hi everybody. I was stupid enough to file duplicate #599203, and in that thread a solution for was proposed using gconf-editor but that turned out to be false hope. Because the issue seems to be low priority and some people think it doesn't deserve a fix yet, here is another scenario where it annoyed me: During a presentation, the notifications popped over the full screen PDF presentation, due to bad wireless in the room it kept popping up saying "connected again" and a few minutes later "connection lost". Turning off the internet all together was not an option because parts of the talk used the internet. Is there any way, apart from patching the source, to change this behavior? (something that will survive an update)
It should be possible to disable connect/disconnect notifications already using the gconf-editor. Open gconf-editor and navigate to this path: /apps/nm-applet/ There you will find the settings to disable notifications, check the disable boxes and you should get rid of the notifications. This does not work under Ubuntu because a patch[1] they use does not honor the gconf settings. [1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/network-manager-applet/+bug/341684
Implemented quite a while. (nm-applet right click "Enable Notifications" checkbox)